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Friday, June 5, 2015

Art Room In Progress

I am on a never-ending quest to organize our house; we have good systems and I try to use them. Even with all this organization, we have a few areas that need to be reworked-- places where our systems are failing. The art room is our chief trouble spot. It is a room with hard use, lots to store, and is the inadvertent dumping ground for the rest of the house. You can almost bet that anytime we de-clutter one room, something gets shoved in the art room. Long summer days are particularly hard on our dear old art room.

After two weeks of summer, my beloved (and once organized) art room was beginning to look like this:

On Wednesday, IHeart Organizing admitted that even her swoon-worthy and hyper-organized house could use a tune up. She challenged herself and readers to "wait no more" to tackle one room per week for four weeks here. I am accepting he challenge and will be linking to her each Friday to show what I have done. Since I only had two days this time, this is not a before-and-after post. This is just a "state of the union" as I assess what is working and why the mess is creeping in. She even offered a free printable that helps you think about your project. In all my organization projects, I have never done this thinking part, and I think it will help immensely.

I determined that the following things are working for me:Lighting--the room has great lighting from a window and bright cans.Shelving--the clean-line white built-in's provide ample storage, much of which is already working for me.Furniture--I love the clear and white table, desk and ghost chairs, which minimize visual clutter.White storage bins--These stark white bins are already working to corral lots of small thingsSeparated Kid and Adult Art Supplies--helpful to preserve all of our sanity

Even though everything isn't perfect behind the closed doors, the cabinets are good for holding the things I need. Here is a cabinet that holds adhesives, adult paint and glitter, and extra paper tools (the kids' versions of these supplies rest below this cabinet in sliding bins):

Here is my gift wrap cabinet and the open area beneath it:

Sure, I could probably take these areas to the next level, but after thinking about it, they get the job done!!

So, why is there still so much clutter? Here are the things that aren't working:Filing--I have a ton of cute folders and only one small rack to file in so that paperwork is constantly left outWindows 8--this whole room was meant to get me and our girls out of my husband's office, but we don't know how to use the computer because it was windows 8. As a consequence we keep using the old computer in his office and the old Silhouette which was hooked up to his computer. You may notice one of our clutter items is an unused new Silhouette.Silhouette---since we never plugged it in, I have never found a good place for the machineCharging Station-- We have a stack of nooks and Ipods that need to be charged but there is no location to do thatNo Recycling In this art room, devoted to paper, I have no dedicated recycling bin, and I leave often leave a pile of scraps to recycleStaging Area The room becomes the staging area for all projects, including those that have nothing to do with art. (that pile of stuff in front of the chalk board is summer camp packing)We are lazy--as fun as it is to do a project, it is no fun to clean it up!

The printable also includes a planning and shopping list section, which I will include in the reveal. What a great motivation; I hope you will follow along and link up too!

About Me

Hi, I am S. Long ago I planned to study social work, get a law degree, and marry a fellow professional when I graduated. We were supposed to effortlessly have two awesome careers, save the world, and a make family. I did most of that--I have a bachelors and masters in social work, married my law school sweetheart, worked for a decade as a children's advocacy attorney, and we do have two precious girls!! To my surprise, my career is mostly a SAHM and most days all I try to "save" is my own sanity! For two decades I have been a near professional volunteer in addition to my actual work. I briefly tried to be an "event stylist." I am currently using this blog to help me figure out my next big plan.